I guess servers are terrible computers too because you can’t carry them in your pocket?
Or phones are terrible computers because they can only stay powered for a day or two?
Blockchain is horribly inefficient in almost every regard. But thats the trade off.
It only looks better than the alternatives if you live in a place where the economy is heavily mismanaged. If you're currency is only better than the absolute worst economies in the world don't expect all the people in better economies to look favorably on it. Except perhaps as a way to further exploit those in terrible economies by speculating in that currency and driving high volatility in it's value.
> Actually Bitcoin keeps moving the goalposts.
Okay.
So much for the trustless auditable log. Btw "auditable log" is easy (eg certificate transparency), the hard part is deciding what goes in it.
Having said that you always trust something, you better do it consciously and run some real consensus algorithm like raft or stellar consensus protocol.
The tradeoff GP is referring to is efficiency for security. If you have a distributed, "trustless" network you unfortunately have to trade your efficiency for more security.
It's also completely contrived. Being digital means infinitely replicable, or thereabouts. Do we really need this game of artificial scarcity?
People used to talk about things like property records, but if this realm of artificial scarcity is going to interface with the realm of actual scarcity in the real world, it's still going to need the systems of adjudication that already exist in the real world.
Code is law. But law is not code, otherwise legal disputes would have long since been settled and we wouldn't need systems of courts and various legal avenues to surface new areas of contention and revisit old areas in new light.
If the above wasn't an issue. How do you get past the resource hogginess? These things are currently handling a minuscule portion, if that, of what their proponents propose they take on, and they are already comically massive resource hogs. How can they scale?
Oh please! Remember the Ethereum fork? It's mob rule at best.
If code was law then the founders of Ethereum would be broke having lost their fortunes to the genius that exploited a bug in their code.
Regarding your second point: Look into newer projects like Solana, Polkadot or Cardano which are already live and have much better scalability.
Cross border maybe, but then what court would you go to?
> Look into newer projects like Solana, Polkadot or Cardano
Are these newer projects more or less built with the same vision? What is their reason for being?
Censorship resistance would be nice, so would laws against private censorship in certain areas. Distributed mechanisms of censorship resistance would be more trustworthy and transparent. But people find information in centralized locations, be it a library, or Twitter, etc.
Is there legit headway towards combining beneficial aspects of distribution with the efficacy of centralized platforms? What are the mechanisms that keep it running and the incentives involved?
What does this mean?
When I say code is law, I mean “law” in the physics sense. We can code, print “hello world”, and know exactly what the code will do. We can write code up to some threshold of complexity and know exactly what it will do in all cases. Like how given certain information about a physical system we can calculate trajectories or whatnot up to some threshold of complexity.
I was making the point that civil law is a different kind of law from this physics sense of the word.
With more clarity, code is physics law, but civil law is not physics law, i.e. civil law cannot be fully ported to computer code.
Maybe I'm wrong and all civil law could be translated to computer code. Might that make for a better world? Even if possible, there's so much inertia in the system with lawyers and judges wanting to keep their job which is another human complexity that would have to be worked through.
But smart contracts would change the way contracts are written, as they're often intentionally ambiguous for a variety of reasons. There's also the problem of "oracles", but we already have a profession for translating real-world events into legal ones (notaries).
And people were willing to pay hundreds of dollars for plush toys with the appropriate tags preserved in plastic. Bubbles are a thing, and the crowd can be wrong. To pretend otherwise is silly.
More fundamentally, the original promise of Bitcoin was that it would act like a currency. It has failed at this. You can tell because all of the advocates have shifted over from “money of the future” to “it’s a store of value”; a subtle admission that it’s not actually functioning like a currency.
Technology evolves over time. Just because its not perfect at the first go, doesn’t mean it should go in the trash.
The converse is also true; just because it’s an improvement over past failures doesn’t mean that it’ll actually work.
My issue with crypto has always been fundamental; I don’t think crypto fans really have a good grasp on what motivates the average person, because most crypto fans[0] are ideologues, and like many ideologues they struggle to recognize that not everyone shares their values. Decentralized and trust-less speaks to engineers, but your average person has no idea what that means and doesn’t really care either. Plus a lot of the consequences of crypto currency design are absolute anti-features from a consumer perspective; nobody wants to find out that losing their password means that they’re broke, or that they can’t reverse a fraudulent charge. Your average consumer wants those features, and is willing to give up decentralization, something they didn’t value, to get it.
0 - At least those fans of crypto that want to see it used as currency. As compared to those crypto fans that want to do whatever it takes to make the number go up.
Yes. He also is a Twitter shitposter who got in trouble with the SEC for promising to take Tesla private at $420 a share, a number he picked because it was funny, and was also involved in the GME nonsense a few weeks back.
If you’re pointing to men like him as serious figures pushing for bitcoin’s adoption, then it’s time to stop and rethink a lot of things.
> yet Bitcoin acceptance keeps growing say by day, how do you explain that?
Bitcoin speculation grows day by day. People want to get rich (in USD I’ll point out) with it. Actual usage of Bitcoin as a currency is not growing.
As always, gimme a call when I can buy a latte and groceries with it. I’ve seen literally one place with a “we take Bitcoin” sticker, and the receptionist had absolutely no idea why it was there or what it meant.
> Is everyone else wrong?
Why couldn’t they be?
Same problem as when you're in let's say Uzbekistan and only have Rubles, an exchange has to happen in order to spend your Rubles in local currency.
Not going to try and disuade your from your position but bitcoin is not going anywhere and might as well accept it.
It's supposed to be money, not a religion. I don't need to accept bitcoin into my heart, or something strange like that.
That's all I'm implying with accepting. You'll get bitcoin when it makes sense for you. Nobody is forcing you to do anything, but like I said bitcoin is here and your lack of acceptance doesn't hinder it.
It’s individual trades that depend on the price because they have finite endpoints. However, assets are owner independent and therefore based on their long term value proposition.
The fundamental part of a blockchain is that each block signs the previous block, making it very difficult to rewrite history. And it is exactly what git does.
We could implement a cryptocurrency on a git repository. Just commit and push 'I am X, here is the proof, send Y gitcoins to Z' whenever you want to do that.
The only thing git is lacking compared to say, bitcoin, is a builtin way to select the "origin" repository. In most git-based projects, there is a global consensus on a central location. In bitcoin, it is automatically selected based on who wasted to most computing power on a pointless cryptography problem.
Blockchain is a funding key word.
There, fixed that for you.
Blockchains offer an alternative system (outside of government run systems) to keep track of ownership. Now, in my opinion there's little to gain of replacing those existing systems - they are working just fine. But for a new asset class (notably digital assets) blockchains will work very well.
Again, the important change is the change in social consensus. If you told someone 5 years ago that you hold a certain token on the Ethereum blockchain nobody would have cared. If you today ran a registry of tokens on your github repository nobody would care. But if you hold a token today on the Ethereum blockchain then people are willing to pay for it.
you mean, the 1979-model Merkle tree? I concur that in a lot of marketed "blockchains", the closest to a useful bit is the 1979-model Merkle tree.
A blockchain is a linked list where each element of the list contains the hash of the previous element. It's basically a degenerate Merkle tree. That is all that it is. It isn't a metaphor. It isn't throwing off the shackles of an overreaching government, nor is it a takeover of our society by militant right-wing conspiracy theorists.
It's a data structure.
You can't build a public database on a Merckle tree without being able to agree on what goes into it.
A blockchain is just a data structure. It isn't even a very interesting one.
In common parlance "blockchain" isn't well-defined: it just refers to something that's, like anarchy, dude, whoa....
> The first blockchain was conceptualized by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008.
So "degenerate Merkle tree" is not enough, it also needs consensus mechanism, byzantine failure tolerance and so on.
Insisting on meaning of "blockchain" which is different than commonly accepted will just make all arguments more confusing.
Doubtful, because ownership only makes sense in a context of scarcity whereas digital assets are in infinite supply.
Edit: Arguing in good faith... you could suggest changing the protocol, sure, however you would need follow that particular blockchain's rules for gaining consensus about changing the rules first.
Your profit was actually made possible by others adopting these other tokens which is entirely external to Bitcoin's protocol or community's desires. And as we've seen with some Bitcoin spinoffs, forking does not guarantee profit.
There's plenty of things that are scarce but essentially worthless. There's no robust secondary market in Penn Central Railroad timetables, the little plastic caps that SNES cartridges came with, or copies of the May 18, 1986 edition of Arizona Republic.
Having a built in utility factor is a very strong way to answer the "is it worth having?" question. It provides a stickiness to the asset, rather than just being a pump-and-dump vehicle.
Gold says "I'm worth having! I can be made into jewelry and really good connectors for premium audio cables."
The paper dollar says "I'm worth having! I can keep the IRS from sending you to jail."
Hell, even MMORPG gold says "I'm worth having, because you can trade me for a Sparkly Unicorn Rainbow Dragon of Death mount."
Different cryptocurrencies are making a wide range of cases, ranging from "I can let you transfer value cheaply and quickly across borders" to "I can let you buy contraband goods without an obvious paper trail." And a lot of these claims are still to be proven or fully realized.
It's entirely possible we're barking up the wrong tree with blockchain. Maybe there's a killer app for it that's not currency, but the current trends seem to be predominantly about it. (It feels like a lot of the supply-chain-tracking and registry-of-ownership hype died down)